Verizon Reportedly Wants to Buy Yahoo and Kick Out Marissa Mayer

Private-equity firms, tech companies, and telecom groups have started to place their bids for Yahoo’s core business in advance of its April 11 deadline. The latest company expected to make a play for the faltering Internet property is Verizon, according to Bloomberg, which reports that the telecommunications company would bid on Yahoo’s core Internet business—its mail services, search features, and news Web sites—as well as the company’s stake in Yahoo Japan. Verizon values the company’s Internet business at less than $8 billion, according to the report. If Verizon were to successfully bid on and purchase those Yahoo entities, Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer would reportedly be replaced by AOL boss Tim Armstrong and executive vice president Mari Walden, who would run both Yahoo and AOL.

According to Bloomberg, Google is also planning to bid on the company, though Re/code’s Kara Swisher, who has reported exhaustively on Yahoo, has already contested this on Twitter. Comcast and AT&T, two names that have been bounced around as potential buyers, are not bidding either, according to Bloomberg, and neither will Microsoft, which was said to have been in talks to finance a takeover of Yahoo alongside a private-equity firm. Plenty of private-equity firms, including TPG and Bain, and media company Time Inc. are all also planning to bid on Yahoo, as is Japan’s SoftBank Group, according to Bloomberg.

Yahoo’s financials are alarmingly bleak. Re/code’s Swisher got her hands on the “sale book” Yahoo is giving to potential suitors, and if the numbers inside are to be believed, Yahoo’s revenue is expected to decline 15 percent and its earnings are expected to drop by more than 20 percent. Yahoo’s revenue is expected to be $3.5 billion this year—down from $4.1 billion in 2015 and $4.4 billion in 2014. Potential buyers, Swisher says, are frustrated because the book obfuscates which parts of Yahoo are making money. For Mayer, the sale boils down to whether the deal closes before she leaves the company. If Yahoo sells with Mayer at the helm, her golden parachute is worth about $37 million; if she gets fired before a sale finalizes, she’ll walk away with about $12.5 million.